What Apple Announced
Apple's China newsroom said on October 31, 2026 that Apple Intelligence features are coming to users in mainland China. Developer testing starts with the November 4 beta, and the public rollout comes with iOS 27.3 in December. Other platforms follow "after necessary approvals", with no date. Alibaba's Qwen powers parts of Siri, Writing Tools (including Create) and Visual Intelligence, covering text and image understanding. Users need a Qwen account or Sign in with Apple.
Step 1: Know What Ships and What Doesn't
| Included | Not included |
|---|---|
| Writing Tools, Visual Intelligence, Live Translation (including via AirPods), Clean Up, Genmoji, natural-language Photos search, Memory movies, mail and notification summaries, Smart Replies, Type to Siri | The AI-powered Siri and the other next-generation features shown at WWDC 2026. Image Playground is not named, and MacRumors reports it is excluded |
Devices are iPhone 16 and later, iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, iPhone Air and iPhone Duo, with device and Siri language set to English or Simplified Chinese. Apple's release doesn't mention Baidu, despite older reports.
Step 2: Work Out Which Features Touch Your Brand
Visual Intelligence is the big one for consumer brands. Point the camera at a product or a poster and Qwen describes it, so the answer depends on what Qwen knows about your product and how it reads your packaging. Writing Tools matter less, because they work on what the user wrote. Summaries matter for brands that email Chinese customers: a summary may be all the reader sees of your newsletter or receipt.
Step 3: Test Qwen Directly Now
You don't need to wait for December. Run your category prompts in Qwen's own app and API in Simplified Chinese and English: "what is [brand]", "best [category] in China", and image prompts with photos of your product. That shows what the model knows. Apple's integration may add its own instructions, so re-test on a beta device once you can. See the Qwen brand FAQ.
Step 4: Fix the Sources Qwen Learns From
Qwen draws more heavily on Chinese-language sources than Western assistants do. Check your brand's presence on Chinese platforms your buyers use, and make sure your official Chinese name and product names are used consistently. A brand with three different transliterations looks like three brands to a model.
Step 5: Make Packaging and Product Pages Machine-Readable
For Visual Intelligence, clear brand marks, legible product names in both scripts, and product pages with clean structured data make it more likely the model identifies the product correctly and finds the right page. See structured data for AI.
Step 6: Re-Test After iOS 27.3
Run the same prompt set on a device in December and keep it as a baseline. When the next-generation Siri reaches China, which Apple has not dated, your brand will be described by Siri itself, and you'll want the comparison. For the global picture, see optimizing for Siri in iOS 27.